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Daxiong had looked at him for a long time.

‘If I confide something in you, little Ye, you’ll keep your trap shut and not tell anyone?’

‘Okay.’

‘Not even Mak or Xiao-Tong?’

‘O-okay.’

‘Do I have your word?’

‘Of course. Erm – what’s going on?’

‘Don’t ask.’

But even on that odd day the standard rebuff hadn’t sounded as desperate and furious as it had just now. It seemed as if the suspicions that Ye had held for a long time were being borne out. The six of them had conspiratorial rituals. His limbs quivered as he crossed the inner room, which was still in a state of complete chaos from the previous night, and barely negotiable for leftover food, bottles, cigarette ends and drug paraphernalia. Alcohol, stale smoke and piss launched a general attack on his chemoreceptors. Mak and Xiao-Tong had been together for four weeks, and had been at the same concert as him. After that they’d had one hell of a party. It was only towards morning that Ye had crept, royally zonked, to Yoyo’s ‘summer residence’. Even now his head felt like an aquarium that the water sloshed around in every time he moved, but Daxiong trusted him.

You’ll find corpses—

Something terrible must have happened. Ye guessed where the other two might be found. Ma Mak slept, with his parents and his brothers and sisters, in the ruin of a half-demolished house on the edge of the estate. The family shared a single room, while Hui Xiao-Tong lived alone in a cave-like shed nearby. That was where he would find them.

He staggered out into the harsh light, narrowed his eyes and ran across the vacant lot to his motorbike.

* * *

Inside the warehouse it was gloomy, a vast space, the ceiling somewhere between twenty and thirty metres high, riveted walls, steel joists. Huge racks suggested that cast steel had been stored here in the past.

Shots rang out behind them. Their echo was thrown back by walls and ceilings, acoustic ricochets.

‘Oi, watch where you’re flying,’ shouted Yoyo.

Jericho turned his head and saw the blond-haired guy catching up with him.

‘Dive!’

Their pursuer approached. Shots whipped through the hall again. Turbine wailing, they raced between the racks towards the rear wall of the warehouse, another door there, ceiling height, which was fortunately open. On the other side yawned a space even darker than this one.

Something that looked like a crane emerged from the darkness.

‘Careful!’

‘If you don’t keep your trap shut—’

‘Higher! Higher!’

Jericho obeyed. The airbike skipped away over the crane in a breakneck parabola. Suddenly it was too near the ceiling. At the last minute he swivelled the jets in the opposite direction. The machine turned at an angle, darted downwards and started spinning on its axis at fantastic speed. Circling madly they wheeled into the next hall. Jericho caught a glimpse of their pursuer, saw him just passing under the lintel and going into a controlled nosedive, then the blond guy steered his bike into theirs and rammed them from the side, but what was intended to throw them off course had the opposite effect. As if by a miracle the bike stabilised itself. Suddenly they were flying straight ahead once more, worryingly close to the wall. Jericho narrowed his eyes. This factory space seemed even bigger and higher than the one before. A line of rollers, in their hundreds, ran along the floor, clearly a kind of conveyor belt leading to a tall, looming structure. Massive and gloomy, it looked like a printing press, except that this one would have been producing books for giants.

A rolling mill, it occurred to Jericho. It was the frame for a roller, to crush iron ingots into sheets. The things you know!

Again the blond guy came down, trying to squash them against the wall. Jericho looked across at him. A triumphant grin flashed in the man’s blood-spattered face.

At that he saw red.

‘Yoyo?’

‘What?’

‘Hold on tight!’

As soon as she pressed against him, he threw the handlebars around and gave the
attacking bike a mighty thump with the back of his own. Yoyo screamed. Splinters of exploding windscreen sprayed in all directions. The hitman’s bike was slung aside, his gun disappeared into the darkness. Jericho didn’t give him time to breathe, he rammed his bike again, as they hurtled side by side towards the rolling-mill.

‘And with my very warmest wishes,’ he yelled, ‘have a bit of this!’

The third blow rammed the blond guy’s rear. His bike somersaulted in the air, whirled towards the rolling mill. Jericho drew past him, saw the hitman struggling for control and balance, arms flailing, and settled into the curve. They flew just past the colossus, but instead of the ugly noise of a bike’s fatal impact they heard a sequence of loud gunshots. Somehow the guy had managed to avoid a collision and lower his bike to the floor. Like a stone on the surface of the water, it skipped over the rollers of the conveyor belt, tipped over and threw its rider off.

The next gaping portal opened up in front of them.

‘Yoyo,’ he called back. ‘How the hell do we get back out of here?’

‘We don’t.’ Her outstretched arm pointed past him into the darkness. ‘Once you’re through there, you go straight to hell.’

* * *

Xin didn’t bother about the individual biker who was helplessly trying to follow them. The guy was ridiculous. Huge, clumsy, a joke. Let him empty his magazine into the air. In time he’d wish he’d never been born.

He kept a lookout for the airbikes.

They’d disappeared.

Perplexed, he wheeled above the plant, but it was as if the sky had swallowed up the two machines. The last he had seen of them was when they flew around a complex of factory buildings behind which a single big chimney loomed.

It was there that he had lost track of them.

The grouchy whine of the bike reached him from below. He toyed with the idea of raining a few grenades down on the giant’s bald head. His index finger tapped against a spot to the side of the instrument panel, and a cover immediately slid aside just above his right knee. Behind it lay a considerable arsenal of weapons. Xin inspected the contents of the compartment on the other side. All there, hand grenades, sub-machine-gun. Gingerly, almost tenderly, his fingers slipped over the butt of the M-79 launcher with the incendiary rounds. All three airbikes were equipped with the same weapons.

Including Jericho’s.

He shoved the thought aside and glanced at the altitude gauge: 188 metres above sea level. He continued his search with reduced thrust. The sky couldn’t swallow anyone as quickly as that.

* * *

If part of the roof hadn’t been open, it would have been pitch-dark. But as it was, spears of white daylight jabbed in at an angle, carving weird details from the walls, casting lattices over walkways, steps, balconies, terraces, pipes, cables, segmented and riveted armour, massive, open bulkheads.

Jericho slowed his bike in the beam of light. Hissing softly, it hovered in the air, which was impregnated with iron, rust and the smell of rancid grease.

He threw back his head.

‘Forget it,’ called Yoyo. Her voice bounced across walls and ceilings, and was caught between the constructions. ‘It’s barred up there. We won’t get through.’

Jericho cursed and looked round. He couldn’t really tell whether this room was any bigger than the one they had flown through before, but at any rate it looked monumental, almost Wagnerian in its dimensions, a Nibelheim of the industrial age. Steel joists a metre thick ran along the ceiling; open baskets hung from them, anchored to massive hinges, so big that he could have fitted his Toyota inside any one of them. A pipe about three metres in diameter grew from the darkness of the vaulted ceiling, led downwards at an angle and finished halfway up the hall. More of the basket-like formations were distributed across the floor, and containers were stacked along the walls.

Yoyo was right. There was something hellish about the whole thing. A chilly hell. Still startled by his unexpected knowledge of the rolling mill, Jericho tried to remember the purpose of this place. Steel was heated here, in colossal containers called converters. Right in front of them gaped their skewed, round mouths, hatches leading to the heart of the volcano, great maws that would normally have glowed red and yellow with molten ore. Now they lay there, black and mysterious, three in all.

A world extinguished.

The hiss of the other airbike came across from beyond the passageway, changed, grew more distinct. It was getting closer.

‘Hey, what’s with these things?’ Yoyo leaned forward and pointed at one of the gaping entrances to the converter. ‘He won’t be able to find us in there.’

Jericho didn’t reply. The bike would fit quite easily in one of the converters, with both of them on it. The maw was big enough, the container was bulbous and several metres deep. And yet he didn’t like the idea that they might be trapped down there. He brought the machine up, towards the ceiling.

‘If only you hadn’t brought us in here,’ Yoyo complained.

‘If only you’d brought your computer with you,’ Jericho snarled back. ‘Then we wouldn’t be making targets of ourselves.’

Between two joists, right below the ceiling, there was a platform from which you had a vantage point over most of the hall. The converters yawned far below them,
separated from one another by large armoured bulkheads. Sunbeams stroked their bike, explored its shape, let it go. With extreme concentration Jericho fiddled with the controls, and the jets produced a small amount of reverse thrust, just enough for the machine to move slowly backwards over the edge of the platform.

‘He’s coming,’ hissed Yoyo.

A beam of light crept into the hall from the neighbouring space. The blond guy had turned on the headlight. Jericho silently settled the airbike on the platform and turned off the engine. The hiss faded to a faint hum. He almost felt something like pride at his navigational abilities. The blond guy wouldn’t hear them above the noise of his own machine, and the gloom up here would swallow them up. They clung to the ceiling like a fat, lurking insect.

‘And by the way I
did
bring my computer,’ Yoyo whispered.

Puzzled, Jericho turned round to look at her.

‘I thought—’

‘That
wasn’t
my computer. I just wanted him to think it was. I wear mine on my belt.’

He raised his hand and hushed her. Far below their pursuer appeared and hovered slowly along underneath them. His bike hissed quietly, and a powerful finger of cold, white light crept around the building. Jericho leaned forwards. The blond guy was craning his head in all directions, looking at the ceiling without seeing them, peering between the containers. His gun lay heavy in his right hand.

Had he lost them?

Jericho hesitated. Highly unlikely that the man had gone looking for his pistol after the crash. The force of the collision had slung it far out into the darkness of the hall where the rolling mills were. There was only one explanation. His bike was fitted with more weapons, and if that was true of all of them, then—

On either side of the tank, he thought. That was the only place where there was room, right in front of his legs.

His fingers ran over the body of the bike.

Yep, no doubt about it, there were chambers there, cavities under the casings. But how did you get them open?

Below them, the hitman curved through the hall. The luminous eye darted between constructions and containers, slid along walkways and balconies. Only now did Jericho notice that their pursuer was creeping towards a tunnel-shaped hatch that opened up to the rear of the arched ceiling. Rails led from it to the inside of the hall. The blond guy stopped his bike and glanced in. He seemed uncertain whether to go inside before scouring the entire hall, then he turned back and climbed higher.

He was coming right towards them.

Jericho thought frantically. In a few seconds the killer would find them in their hiding-place. Like a man possessed, he searched the casings and the instrument panel for a way of opening the weapon compartments. The hissing got closer. He felt Yoyo’s breath on the back of his neck, craned his head and ventured to look. The blond guy was two-thirds of the way up the hall.

Less than a metre, and he would see them.

But he got no higher.

Instead, his gaze wandered downwards and fixed on the mouths of the converters, that were turned towards him, lips rounded as if to suck him in, and Jericho realised what he was thinking. The bike stood motionless above one of the gaping maws. There was inky blackness within the steel cooking pot, no way of telling if anyone was hiding inside. The blond guy reached into a compartment on his bike, pulled something long from it and threw it down, then accelerated and got out of the danger zone.

A second went by.

Another, and another.

Then came the inferno.

The grenade went off with a deafening boom. A column of fire shot several metres out of the converter as the pressure of the explosion burst from the opening, bathed the hall in glowing red light, whirled smoke in all directions. Jericho grimaced, so painful was the echo in his ears.

* * *

The rumble of the explosion spread, escaped through the light-slit in the roof of the converter hall, its panes of glass shattered long since, vibrated the air molecules above and spread through the sky.

Xin heard the explosion two hundred metres higher up.

Something had gone up. Where exactly he couldn’t have said, but he was sure that there had been a bang in one of the halls lined up to the west of the blast furnace.

Daxiong, on the other hand, had no doubt that the explosion originated in the converter hall.

He pulled the motorbike round, spraying up gravel, and at the same moment Xin plunged down from the sky like a hawk.

* * *

‘Get a move on, damn you!’

Lau Ye was really furious. He was hopping from one leg to the other in Xiao-Tong’s shed, watching his friends slowly putting on their shirts and trousers, as if the process of getting dressed contained incalculable risks. Ma Mak revealed the stoicism of a zombie, not embarrassed in the slightest that little Ye had found her
and Xiao-Tong naked, in a position that left no doubt about the activity they had been engaged in when they fell asleep. Xiao-Tong blinked hard, trying to banish tiny living creatures from the corners of his eyes.